I guess one of the most qualified persons to answer your question is John
Maloney and we discussed this in detail in an interview we made with him.
You can read the relevant parts of this interview in the August issue of
Squeak News which you can download from
http://www.squeaknews.com/download/index.html. Unfortunately currently the
only way to read the interview is to download the whole issue although we
are trying to address this. I believe you can find an answer to your
question in that article.

Cheers,

Tansel

There is a lenghty discussion of possible answer to your question in

> I have a question about Self that I have anxious to post to the Squeak
mailing list
> (because I know there are people here with the right experience to answer
it). I've
> been wondering: what is wrong with Self? Why hasn't it taken over the
world? :)
>
> In many ways, Self seems like an improvement over Smalltalk, and I get the
impression
> that the "Programming as Experience" inspiration for Self has a lot to do
with the
> direction Squeak is headed. But, other than Morphic and "HotSpot(tm)", it
looks like
> many of the Self concepts have been ignored. Is it because it turns out to
be hard to
> organize a big system without classes? Is it because implementations exist
for only a
> few types of computers, so many people have never experienced it? Or is
there
> something else?
>
> Ted
>
>